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Update on Our Planned Move from Azure to Google Cloud Platform
- w8rbt 8y agoSeems silly to move just because MS bought github. Are there other compelling reasons?
- blibble 8y agonot saying it's the reason but their funding comes from Google Ventures http://uk.businessinsider.com/gitlab-raises-20-million-from-gv-2017-10 http://uk.businessinsider.com/gitlab-raises-20-million-from-...
- k__ 8y agoYes, I also read they would do this to prepare for a Google buy.
- jhall1468 8y agoThat makes little sense for Google. The corporate cultures are very different, GitLab isn't a major money maker and it does nothing for them internally since they use a mono-repo. Cloud platforms can change after acquisitions. If Google wanted them they would have already bought.
- jonny_eh 8y agoFree Gitlab membership with a paid GCP account sounds attractive.
- jacques_chester 8y ago> The corporate cultures are very different Generally, companies are not bought for culture. Folks say a lot about their most valuable resource being their people, but typically a purchaser wants to buy assets. In software that will be less about cash or inventory or plants and more about customer contracts, partnerships, brands, trademarks, patents, copyrights, existing sales organisations and so on. > GitLab isn't a major money maker ... If Google wanted them they would have already bought. They might buy simply to have a hedge against Github. Gitlab comes with a lot of independent brand awareness that Google has not, so far, been able to gain against Github in this area. The cloud providers are involved in a no-prisoners effort to lock in customers while the market emerges for the first time. This is golden age of rail stuff, there are massive path dependencies that will be very difficult to unwind. Each will grow aggressively on every edge of their current surfaces, whether by implementation, partnership or purchase. Or all three, in varying orders, as they think works best. They will rapidly copy each other to try and prevent competitors gaining an unassailable lead in some segment. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal. We have partnerships with Google and Microsoft.
- brazzledazzle 8y agoIt would let GCP compete with some of the code hosting services Amazon offers.
- bdcravens 8y agoGitlab is more than just git hosting. It provides many pieces of the development workflow (like CI, staging deployments, etc). Moreover, Firebase wasn't much of a money maker either, and took a smaller amount of funding than Gitlab.
- anothergoogler 8y ago> it does nothing for them internally since they use a mono-repo Completely irrelevant; Google does not version-control their projects substantially with Git. They used Perforce for a long time and now I understand they use some internal, proprietary VCS.
- tehlike 8y agoThis is the kind of thing that happens after acqusition.
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- koiz 8y agokubernetes
- ryanSrich 8y agoAKS is solid, but agree that GKE is the better experience.
- cbHXBY1D 8y agoIt was before AKS was released. ACS was Azure's Kubernetes entrant and it was hot garbage. AKS is a solid system built by Brendan Burns and his team at Microsoft.
- ryanSrich 8y agoI never got around to trying ACS and at this point have no reason to. My experience with AKS is mostly with the Azure REST API (building security and compliance tools around AKS). Unfortunately AKS isn't within scope of MSFTs BAA yet, so my focus has mostly been on other services like Cosmos and App Service.
- simcop2387 8y agoThey had started this move months before Microsoft purchased Github. If you read the linked article one of the biggest reasons is that the GCP implementation of kubernetes and better integration with their CDN they'll be getting a significant performance boost. It's taken this long since they've had to make infrastructure changes along with some code changes to get it better supporting the deployment there.
- scurvy 8y agoWhat meaningful CDN integrations are in Google Cloud?
- jacques_chester 8y agoPresumably: https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/ https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/
- minimaxir 8y agoA lot of companies have been migrating to GCP for pragmatic "it's cheaper" reasons. GitLab in particular had a big booth at Google Next.
- apengwin 8y agoFrom my experience, Google cloud is much easier to use than Azure.
- ur-whale 8y agoSounds like a rather good reason to me. As a matter of fact they should in fact avoid any kind of cloud vendor lock-in and spread the deployment across the big 3
- mjw1007 8y agoWhen they were talking about moving off cloud altogether, they mentioned that the reason they were on Azure in the first place was that they were given a pile of free credits. So I suppose once those ran out it was a good idea to choose the best provider from first principles, rather than letting the inertia marketing succeed.
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- Kudos 8y agoWhy is it that Microsoft are ok with serving traffic from countries under embargo but Google are not? As far as I know Amazon don't follow the embargo like this with AWS traffic either.
- djsumdog 8y agoAren't many of the Azure data centers actually contracted out to other independent companies in those respective countries?
- CurtHagenlocher 8y agoI believe it's just China and Germany.
- Kudos 8y agoThat's to deal with local restrictions, not to deal with US trade embargoes.
- jpsim 8y agoThis might have something to do with how data on GCP will be encrypted at rest. US law treats encryption effectively as a weapon and restricts where products that include encryption can be shared.
- cube2222 8y agoDo you have any source for this?
- jacques_chester 8y agoAmazon does not actually operate any data centres in China. They contract it out, or license their brand name, I am not sure exactly which. I believe to avoid legally squiggliness between Chinese law and laws elsewhere. This causes a lot of annoyances -- lots of features are not available in Chinese "AWS" regions, or they require special treatment. When I've gotten reports about slow, incomplete or stalled downloads from CloudFront it is almost always someone who's inside the Great Firewall. I guess GCP decided not to bother with that approach for now.
- octosphere 8y agoJust as a sidenote: Gitlab may no longer be accessible any more from Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. From the article: NOTE to users in Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria GitLab.com may not be accessible after the migration to Google. Google has informed us that there are legal restrictions that are imposed for those countries. See this U.S. Department of the Treasury link for more details. At this time, we can only recommend that you download your code or export relevant projects as a backup.
- SahAssar 8y agoDo we know if there are people using gitlab.com in North Korea?
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y agoSometimes open source projects tend to link to their git repos. Hypothetically something to bypass censorship might just point you to a README on a repo for installation details.
- SahAssar 8y agoRight, I get that it can be useful, I was just interested if there was any indications of gitlab being used in NK. Considering Red Star OS (the NK linux distro) it wouldn't be unimaginable if there was a gitlab fork or a few gitlab.com repos used by NK.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wereHamster 8y agoKinda sad that GitLab doesn't point to VPN providers that those users could use to route around this legal issue.
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- samstave 8y agoHas anyone yet built a tool which will deploy an environment to all three major cloud providers and bench mark them against each?
- dmoy 8y agoI think there's a bunch of tools that simplify deploying to multiple cloud hosts. But I don't know about benchmarking support, sorry.
- geofft 8y agoThere are a few "cloud portability" companies, but the fundamental problem with this approach is that cloud providers don't offer the same APIs and pricing models. If all you want is virtual machines and block storage, you can do it, but the answer is that your site is going to be more expensive on any of the providers than if you built it for an architecture that fits your cloud. If you design for the strengths of, say, Amazon Lambda, you can't use Google Cloud Functions / Azure Functions directly. Most likely you'll just run it on top of self-managed VMs on the other clouds, making Amazon the "clear" winner. If you design for GKE, you'll find that Amazon and Azure's Kubernetes support isn't as good, but maybe there was a better design for your site that wasn't based around GKE. And so forth. And if what you actually want is a fixed amount of compute capacity and block storage and you'll just manage OSes yourself (either because that's actually better for your needs, or because you're operating something that predates containers/serverless/object storage/etc. and the development work to get it there is expensive), just get some dedicated servers in colo, it'll be cheaper than any cloud for that model.
- samstave 8y agoExactly my point for the most part. The fact that you basically had to provide a ELI5 here on HN for this, shows what a dismal job we, as an industry, have done to educate the larger world as to the best-practice of cloud selection should be. We, on HN, for the most part, can spout off this tribal-domain knowledge because we live it most days. But what would be great is to have these types of nuggest of information, empiracally delineated, available without effort to those who would like to know. Specifically, in a way format/method where you don't need to have the lexicon to be able to formulate the proper question. Most people, even those IT people who may work for a tiny office who has very little need for anything "at scale" may not be able to ask the questions. An analogy could be (?): "everyone knows if they need a bike, motorcycle, car, truck or bus - and everyone should be able to assess their basic computing needs as well. It should be fairly clear if you need a single machine in an office, a colo or a cloud - and figuring out a path to doing so and selecting a vendor should be a straightforward task."
- kshitij_libra 8y agoAssuming a buy, gitlab becomes part of gcp offering in the coming future ? :D
- philipov 8y agoThat would be a great way to force people to stop using gitlab.
- goliatone 8y agoIt really seems like Google is becoming the new Micro$oft in ppls minds, while Microsoft is actually branching in two different “entities” Microsoft Cloud and Ol’Microsoft and the emergence of the cloud faction is changing (some) people’s perception of the overall brand name...
- gaius 8y agoGitLab is VC backed, so they have to be looking for an exit/liquidity event, it’s inescapable. Google, Atlassian (roll it into Bitbucket) or Oracle, has to be one of them.
- carlhjerpe 8y agoI honestly don't know, what is vc backed, and how does that turn it's destiny into an exit?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gaius 8y agoThey have taken money from venture capitalists who will expect a return on their investment via a sale. That is how the entire venture capital system works. This is all a matter of public record tho’ it makes uncomfortable reading for some. Those who fled Github to Gitlab when Microsoft bought the former might now find a critical piece of their workflow owned by Oracle!
- tubaguy50035 8y agoKinda neat how careful they were to not say Azure performance was terrible.
- nine_k 8y agoWas it? Are there any numbers?
- kerng 8y agoI'd say it's a positioning move by Gitlab to be a better acquisition target for Google. They might have hoped for Microsoft buying them, but since Microsoft beat Google in getting a hold of Github, they now are realigning. Makes sense.
- dsnuh 8y agoThis is the feeling I get as well. Tighter integration with Kubernetes gets more people interested in using GCP and GKE.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoAnd this is sad either way since people moved to GitLab likely specifically to seek a still-independent code hosting site. I wish more businesses didn't seem like they were built to be acquired. I hope you're wrong. :|
- ganeshkrishnan 8y agoFor sure this is a political move to get closer to Google and antagonizing GitHub which has gone to MS. Weird for me as I love gitlab and azure equally.
- mikewhy 8y agoThis has been planned since before the GitHub acquisition.
- Proven 8y agoLooks like they're trying to get acquired by Google.